by Nick Kyme
The reticule briefly alighted on the designated target zone.
Sicarius fired.
‘Missile away.’
It arced, a savage, fiery parabola that struck the narrow point of the spire and blasted it apart. The detonation blew right through, spitting debris out of the other side. The spire lurched and split, lightning coursing over shattering obsidian, slivers shearing off and fragmenting like shards of broken glass. Secondary explosions erupted down its long shaft, and a chain of incendiary flares saw the entire structure immolate from within.
‘It’s done,’ said Haephestus. ‘The dampening field is down.’
‘Then let us hope our brothers are listening.’
Daceus let go of the door frame. He was staring out of the glacis at the still-burning spire. ‘That was necron, wasn’t it?’
Sicarius nodded, already on his feet, and headed back for the hold.
Haephestus had turned the ship, easing it away from the destruction and pushing the engines as much as he dared to get them clear.
‘Tell me something,’ said Daceus and laid a hand on Sicarius’ breastplate as the rattling of the airframe slowly began to subside. ‘Where are they? We saw that spire days ago. We should be swarming with those bastards by now. The undead bloody legions.’
Sicarius gave him a dark look and Daceus released him. ‘None of this is as expected, Retius. Farrodum, the people, even Agun itself.’
‘There is deceit here,’ Daceus agreed.
‘And we will root it out,’ Sicarius replied, ‘but we cannot leave the city undefended.’ He left out the part about how Haephestus had been attacked. ‘We have to go back and hope we are not too late.’
NOT MEN
Vedaeh wept. She wanted to scream but she needed to see this, to remember it, so that if she lived then others would know what had happened. Pillium’s story would live on.
He staggered, spitting blood as he wrenched arrows from his body or broke the shafts in half. He fell to one knee but through a supreme effort righted himself again to face his murderer.
The henchman had descended the ramparts, and emerged from an archway that led out onto the muddy square.
‘Your kind…’ he said, and Vedaeh heard the fear and the shame in his voice above the rain, and she wondered what had happened to him out in the wilds. ‘Your kind are not men. I have seen your true faces. You are monsters.’ A broad-bladed sword slid out of the scabbard on his back. It was a savage weapon and he had to hold it in two hands.
‘They saved your city!’ cried Vedaeh, unable to keep her peace any longer. ‘You’re right,’ she said, hoping her words might stir some mote of gratitude for what the Ultramarines had done. ‘They are not men. They are more than that. More than you. They saved you.’
The baron gave her a curt glance. ‘Shut her up.’
Vedaeh felt rough hands grab her wrists, and dropped her cane. She struggled at first but knew it was pointless. She looked out onto the ramparts for Scarfel or any of his men, feeling sure he would at least see sense, but he was not there. Only the baron’s cronies stood in audience, and a handful of shocked onlookers drawn to the spectacle but too afraid to say anything. In the crowd, a woman was weeping.
The henchman paused at the sound, his will seeming to falter.
The baron made sure it did not. ‘Haukberd, do your duty.’
He looked back at his liege lord, just once, then nodded.
‘You die now…’ he told Pillium, and charged at him.
The first cut carved a savage line down the Ultramarine’s left flank, Haukberd stepping away from his opponent’s desperate lunge. A second blow slashed open Pillium’s leg and put him down on one knee again. He could barely hold himself upright.
His eyes found Vedaeh’s.
‘Courage and honour…’ he whispered, the words all too plain on his ashen lips, a moment before Haukberd ran him through.
Fighting had broken out across the far rampart, but it seemed remote as everyone’s attention was fixated on the square.
Haukberd pushed the sword as deep as it would go, drawing a gasp from Pillium as the blade exited through his back. He murmured something, grinning savagely, but his face changed abruptly when the broken arrowhead tore out his throat. Dumbfounded, he let go of his sword, backing off uncertainly before falling onto his backside in the mud and then collapsing, his hands still patting ineffectually at his throat until they were still.
Pillium dropped the arrowhead in the dirt, and raised up his chin to meet his end.
Stunned silence ringed the square until the baron, his face a portrait of abject shock, screamed at his archers.
‘Finish it!’
‘Stop this,’ declared Scarfel, a cohort of warriors in tow.
Upon seeing the castellan, the archers hesitated.
‘Don’t listen to him! I am your baron. Do it!’
‘No,’ Scarfel said softly, ‘you won’t.’ He had brought his own archers. He had Reda and Gerrant too. Both were armed. ‘It’s over, Athelnar.’
The baron looked to his men, a mere handful still loyal in the face of the sudden coup. Scarfel had men coming up both of the flanking ramparts. More people were gathering at the edges of the square and had started to jeer and shout at their liege lord.
Looking left and right, then to the grey-faced corpse of his protector, slowly drowning in the mud, Athelnar ran. His warriors locked their shields to cover his escape but relented as soon as they realised how badly outnumbered they had become.
A few of the footmen made to follow, but Scarfel called them back.
‘He won’t get far. There’s nowhere for him to go.’
Vedaeh shrugged off her aggressor, who looked shocked at her sudden strength as she pushed him back. She then retrieved her fallen cane and rushed down the steps, through the archway and into the square. She hurried to Pillium, skirts trailing in the mud, and caught up to him just as he fell onto his side. He was too heavy to hold up, so she wiped the blood and dirt from his face instead.
He lived, barely, but would not last long.
She looked back at the crowd, at Reda and Gerrant, at Scarfel, who had taken charge of the ramparts and the army.
‘Where is he?’ she said.
Scarfel gave her a confused look.
‘The vizier, where is he?’
There was no time to answer. A roar approached on the wind, the throaty burn of engines and the dull throb of turbo-fans. They all heard it and looked skywards.
Vedaeh knew what it was.
The Ultramarines had returned.
They had betrayed him. He should have known. Their petty minds, their petty insignificant lives. Easily bent to whichever wind currently blows strongest.
Athelnar cursed himself for not seeing the castellan’s ambition.
‘I am protecting us…’ he said aloud, hurrying through the secret undercroft of the city, headed for his keep and the treasure vaults. There were men who were still loyal, those he paid in coin. He would need to be quick, though. Find a wagon, good horses. He would need another protector too, for even the thought of sullying his ceremonial sword in combat sent a sick feeling rushing through his gut.
He paused in the darkness, the flaming brand held by one of the guards who had accompanied him from the square flickering patiently just ahead.
‘Sire…’ a second guard began, this one stationed behind him.
Athelnar waved off the guard’s concern, annoyed at his own weakness.
It was all crumbling, at least it was for now.
‘I will find a way back,’ said Athelnar, hurrying through the catacombs now. No one had seen fit to follow. Few even knew of the tunnels under the city. He had more men waiting at the keep. His own warriors, the ones he kept around him and with full purses to ensure they stayed that way. A small army. He had already planned it out. He would flee, taking the men with him. The knights of Macragge had been exposed as monsters. They would doubtless take what they wanted and then leave. All Ath
elnar needed to do was wait for that to happen and then return. Scarfel would have to die, of course, but the people would fall in line. He was sure of that.
‘Yes… I can have it all back,’ he muttered, a smile easing its way across his face as they emerged into a larger chamber and were confronted by a mob of bone-swine.
‘Defend your baron!’ he said, quavering at the sight of the creatures stirring in the darkness. They blinked at the light, their eyes hungry, and sniffed at dank air suddenly pickled by sweat and fear.
The two guards came forwards uncertainly to protect their liege lord, swords drawn and shields up. Bellowing, the bone-swine lumbered at the men.
Athelnar looked away, too afraid to see death coming for him. He thought about going back, running down the corridor, but that path was closed to him now. Perhaps he could slip past, if his guards kept the bone-swine occupied for long enough. He had been about to push one of the guards into the onrushing beasts when an intensely bright flash of light briefly filled the corridor and he clenched his eyes shut. When he opened them again, the steaming husks of bone-swine flesh littered the ground, blasted apart. All dead.
‘Gods…’ breathed Athelnar, relieved and afraid at the same time. Then he saw who was standing before them in the catacombs, a faintly glowing staff in his right hand. His expression went from fear and wonder to confusion and annoyance. ‘You!’ he said, shoving the guards aside now the danger had passed. ‘You wretched coward. Where have you been? It’s a rebellion.’
Nehebkau met the baron’s angry gaze.
‘It is,’ said the vizier, and raised his staff as the light around it began to build anew. ‘But that is no longer your concern.’
The guards died, burned to ash in what seemed like a heartbeat. Time slowed and felt heavy for the baron, like someone had stitched metal coins into his robes. He tried to draw his sword, an unfamiliar sensation, but it was as if it weighed the same as an anvil.
‘What…?’
Even his words were sluggish, stretched like soft leather, barely discernible.
The vizier held a device in his hands, an amulet that looked very much like a compass.
‘I am not a vizier – not yours, at least,’ said Nehebkau.
The baron’s face contorted slowly with abject terror as he forced out the word, ‘Sorcerer…’
‘Chronomancer,’ Nehebkau corrected. ‘See…’ He gestured to the baron’s fingers as they wizened, the skin thinning and stretching and ageing impossibly in moments. ‘I am a shaper of time. Let me show you whom I serve.’
Apparitions bled into the baron’s mind, of skeletal legions rendered in metal, of crescent-shaped sky ships and arachnoid monstrosities, of a one-eyed vizier, deathless, indomitable, the curse of living metal and an ancient empire that meant to reconquer the stars. It was impossible but as his mind and body collapsed, wrenched across time itself, the baron knew it was all true.
He tried to scream as that cyclopean eye stared back at him, but as he opened his mouth all that emerged was dust.
MONSTERS
The dragon descended on steel wings, its nostrils gusting with smoke and fire. It was loud, so loud that Cwen had to clasp her ears, but as afraid as she was she could not take her eyes away from the magnificent creature as it landed in the muddy square. Roofs shuddered, the ground trembled underfoot and the rain went whirling in every direction. Its claws dug furrows in the earth, as sharp as swords and just as long. A roar emanated from deep in its belly, vibrating the air and turning it hot with the furnace warmth of its breath.
Never in her born days had Cwen beheld such a spectacle. Even Yabor, who professed he came from a different age, an age of wonders and the stars within man’s grasp, gazed up at the dragon with awe.
Then as the roar died away, and the air grew still and the ground ceased shaking, Cwen saw something she did not expect. A hatch opened in the dragon’s flank, a battered metal scale that gleamed blue in the light, and out stepped the knights of Macragge to the fear and wonder of all who saw them.
She held Yabor’s hand, grasping it tightly as myth gave way to truth and she started to believe that what he had said might be real. Some of the citizens fled, overwhelmed at the sight, fear welling up until it threatened to drown them. Cwen was amongst those who stayed, more curious than afraid as she stared through the gaps in the crowds. She had run when she was told, but had come back upon seeing Reda return to the square with the castellan and his warriors behind her.
‘I have to go,’ she said, provoking a curious look from her husband, who then understood and released her hand. ‘I have to try to help.’
Cwen slowly edged through the crowds until she was past the closely packed bodies and confronted by the dragon. It radiated heat and its wings were rigid, not leathery or scaly or attached to clawed pinions. Bulky weapons hung beneath them, for what else could they be, as black and hard as soot-stained anvils. It was no dragon, but actually a ship, a metal ship that sailed the sky as readily as a galleon would sail the ocean. Not that she had seen either before.
Pillium was lying on the ground in the dragon’s shadow, collapsed in a pool of his own blood. She hesitated as one of the knights regarded her, his face as grave as winter ice. He and another warrior had formed an honour guard, their backs to Pillium and their blades drawn. They were scarred and battle-worn but still emanated a sense of threat and power. Reda was talking with one of them. He had an eyepatch, and Cwen recognised him as the lord’s seneschal, though she couldn’t remember his name.
‘She’s asking them not to kill us,’ Yabor whispered softly in her ear.
She hadn’t realised he had followed her and Cwen almost jumped when she heard his voice.
‘Would they?’ she asked, suddenly afraid again.
‘They take honour extremely seriously, and have been betrayed.’
‘But they are good men. They saved us.’
‘They are not men, not as we would understand them. What they must have seen and endured to reach Agun, I cannot imagine.’
‘I spoke to him,’ said Cwen. ‘He did not seem so different.’ She shrugged off Yabor’s hand, recognising in him the same dread that kept everyone else at bay, and took a tentative step forwards. The knights of Macragge were not the glorious heroes they had been after saving Farrodum from the bone-swine, they had become foreign and frightening. Other.
Cwen vowed she would not succumb to such small-minded terror.
‘Please,’ she called out to one of the knights. ‘I am the medicus.’
Cwen saw beyond the knight to where his lord knelt down in the dirt, clasping Pillium’s hand in a warrior’s grip. He was whispering something. It looked like a prayer or perhaps an oath of vengeance.
‘He is beyond healing,’ the knight told her coldly, and Cwen shrank back into the crowd and the awe and the majesty of it all dimmed. There were no dragons here, but there were monsters. Not the monsters who had come up from the ground and attacked the city, but the ones who had turned their weapons on an injured man and who had watched and done nothing as he was wounded near to death. The monsters fear created.
Cwen stopped herself. She pushed to the front of the crowd again.
‘You have injured. Let me help.’ She stood her ground, even when the knight began to approach.
It was then that the lord looked up and gestured for her to be allowed through. She nodded as she did so, careful not to meet their gaze for too long in case they considered that a challenge. The smell on them… Sweat and heat, but something else, a chemical odour that stung her nose. It was heady and she found herself trembling.
As Cwen approached the lord of the knights, Pillium gave her a side glance and nodded.
Standing on the outside of the exchange, Reda had the good sense to stay out of it.
‘I am Sicarius,’ said the lord knight, and she could tell he was measuring her, her worth, her sincerity, in a glance. ‘Pillium is dying. There is nothing you can do for him,’ he told her flatly, though she thought
she heard suppressed anger in his voice. ‘But I have others who need a physician…’ He gestured to the ship’s open hatch, where one of the knights sat slumped, his left arm cradled close to his chest, his eyes deep wells of pain. Rents and splits in his armour suggested savage wounds. He turned to look at Cwen, his face as stern as the granite cliff but as grey as stone too.
‘I will do everything I can,’ said Cwen, surprised at her tears. Perhaps they were for Pillium? He looked ahead, as if seeing some mythic afterlife – or perhaps it was simply the darkness encroaching – and he was pale as chalk. It seemed appalling in its way, that a warrior such as that, so indomitable, so beyond mortal frailty, could be killed at all.
‘Do not weep for him,’ Sicarius told her. ‘He died with honour. None of us here can ever ask for more than that.’
He called to one of his men and she was ushered away to the ship. Her last sight was of Pillium, uttering his last words.
His hand shook until Sicarius clasped it. Pillium had been strong, but now his grip was weak and infirm. Injuries that would have killed a lesser man a hundred times over ravaged his pale body. Not even Venatio could have saved him.
‘I know…’ he breathed, so quietly that Sicarius had to lean in to hear him. ‘I know…’ he repeated, his last breaths shallow, sighing rasps. ‘I thought I was being punished. But Helicos sent me with you to prove to myself… that I was worthy… of this.’
He reached out and touched the white sigil emblazoned on the captain’s armour. Then his arm drooped and fell.
Sicarius bowed his head.
‘Cato…’ Vedaeh had just emerged through the throng of onlookers. She stood a little way back out of respect.
‘Are you going to tell me he fought with honour?’
‘You already know he did,’ she said. ‘The baron is dead. Scarfel and his men just found him and two of his guards. The guards were burned, Cato, as if by an energy weapon. But the baron… his body was little more than dust, as if it had aged centuries in seconds. And the vizier is missing.’
Sicarius looked up not at Vedaeh, but at Daceus.